No, but you are going on about it. We get it, you found the writing inferior. Thank you for presenting your opinion.

My apologies, my phone decided to spontaneously brick itself, my job has given me a crappy week, and my patience is probably sub-optimal right now, but I'm reminded of when Glen Bateman encountered Randall Flagg near the end of "The Stand" and burst into laughter, saying "We made such a -business- of you!" So many threads on this board seem to be people going on...and on...and on...about how awful the recent films are. They usually won't change their opinions and they usually won't change anyone else's opinions, so what's the point exactly? What are we accomplishing? Is this some perverse form of catharsis?

Yes, you will have to forgive me for "going on" about Trek on a "Future of Trek" forum on a Trek board. I do happen to care about writing as a craft, believe that Trek can do it well, and to be disinclined to be told that Shizznit (as The Kidz Today might put it) is Shinola. If none of that is your bag, I'm fine with that. Just say so from the outset.

Yes, you will have to forgive me for "going on" about Trek on a "Future of Trek" forum on a Trek board. I do happen to care about writing as a craft, believe that Trek can do it well...

Click to expand...

Problem is that many people here believe that Into Darkness, while flawed, is written well. You're trying to pass off your personal opinion as some type of standard that the Abrams films should aspire to.

Honestly, I think Into Darkness is better written than 85-90% of the entries in the franchise (episodes/movies). Including TOS, which is my personal favorite. A movie can be well written and a fun ride at the same time, the two aren't mutually exclusive.

Your comments come down to "if they had just done it my way it would have been a better movie", which is just non-sense.

I'm 42 and have been a Trek fan since 1975, so I'm not some kid who happens to think that cinema of the past is slow and dated. Star Trek: The Motion Picture is my favorite Trek film.

Perhaps they were underwater, and flying shuttles around beneath ash clouds, to keep Starfleet and their long-range satellites from seeing Kirk break the prime directive?

Now, can someone explain why the Federation Holoship was underwater in Insurrection when it had a cloaking device as well??

Click to expand...

If other Federation ships like the mission scout ship were present, they would see a "hole" in the metaphasic cloud surronding the planet if it were in orbit. Cloaking in on the surface makes it a lot safer and probably easier to beam the Baku to it. But hiding in the water prevents them from walking into it or other ships seeing stray antiproton readings.

More to keep it away from prying eyes of other races, rather than the Baku or Son'a.

No, but you are going on about it. We get it, you found the writing inferior. Thank you for presenting your opinion.

My apologies, my phone decided to spontaneously brick itself, my job has given me a crappy week, and my patience is probably sub-optimal right now, but I'm reminded of when Glen Bateman encountered Randall Flagg near the end of "The Stand" and burst into laughter, saying "We made such a -business- of you!" So many threads on this board seem to be people going on...and on...and on...about how awful the recent films are. They usually won't change their opinions and they usually won't change anyone else's opinions, so what's the point exactly? What are we accomplishing? Is this some perverse form of catharsis?

Click to expand...

People arguing their opinion that the film is poorly written is no different than you arguing your opinion that it isn't. If all this kind of discussion is pointless and redundant, why do you engage in it?

Problem is that many people here believe that Into Darkness, while flawed, is written well.

Click to expand...

And the problem for that claim is that writers and editors have been chewing over the question of what makes or does not make "good writing," particularly in the sense of writing fiction for sale in prose form or for the screen, for some time.

I am not in fact the one trying to "pass off my personal opinion as some kind of standard." What I'm describing are some of the rough "standards" that have emerged from that conversation. What I'm getting back is "well, none of that matters compared to my personal opinion of what 'good writing' is." And respectfully, I don't find that very convincing.

If someone wants to tell me that they don't care about good writing as long as they get a spectacle, that's perfectly fine. If someone wants to say this:

A movie can be well written and a fun ride at the same time, the two aren't mutually exclusive.

Click to expand...

That's 100% true and exactly what I have been saying. But one should not try to say that that's what happened with STID because-I-say-so and expect others to be convinced by that. It isn't going to happen.

Your comments come down to "if they had just done it my way it would have been a better movie"

Click to expand...

My comments come down to "if it had been better written it would have been a better movie." Because a movie can be well-written and be a fun thrill ride. Whether "my way" would necessarily have been better I don't know, but to paraphrase the great Commander Taggart, it doesn't take a great writer to recognize bad writing.

Perhaps they were underwater, and flying shuttles around beneath ash clouds, to keep Starfleet and their long-range satellites from seeing Kirk break the prime directive?

Click to expand...

Yeah, you see, when you have no way to explain something our supposed-heroes have done except to speculate that maybe they're hiding their chicanery from their own command, do you see how maybe that should tell you something?

Now, can someone explain why the Federation Holoship was underwater in Insurrection when it had a cloaking device as well??

Click to expand...

And when you have to resort to saying "Insurrection [not exactly the most highly-regarded of Trek films] sort of did it too, so it must be okay," shouldn't that also tell you something?

Well, it was "unexpected." And don't get me wrong, the ship rising out of the water is, in and of itself, a cool shot.
What makes it bad writing to me is that there is no explicable reason for it to happen except to get the cool shot. Kirk is, we are told repeatedly, a starship Captain of greatness. It could not or at least should not have failed to occur to someone fitting that description that just keeping the ship in orbit would hide it from the natives and allow it to better support Spock's operation in the volcano*. That's why the ship on the sea floor is "unexpected." There is no good reason for him to do it.

The plot requires Kirk, in other words, to act stupidly in a way that has to be lampshaded by his Chief Engineer -- so that the viewers will know not to take any of this seriously, because the writers sure didn't -- in order to get a cool shot. That it was good spectacle does not make it good writing. Having to contrive stupidity on the part of supposedly-capable characters is bad writing. Good writing would have been to find a means to the spectacle or something like it without having to resort to that kind of contrivance.

Click to expand...

I'll have to respectfully disagree with you.

The fact that it's unexpected has nothing to do with Kirk's reasons or lack of reasons for putting the Enterprise under the water. It's simply because of the juxtopositon and contrast of a giant space ship in an environment that we haven't seen it in before.

The film only barely gets into the technicalities of the situation our heroes are in, and for me that's the way it should be. We have almost no information on why the Enterprise is hiding down there and we don't need it. Mostly because a good portion of the audience doesn't care. I get that you do, and that's cool, but pretending that it's some objective yardstick by which to measure the quality of the writing in the scene is intellectually dishonest.

(* Which, even worse for scientific illiteracy: "cold fusion" does not freeze things. And I actually have to wonder if the writers just didn't know that, or knew and just didn't care to come up with an alternate name for the device, like a "stasis bomb" or something. It's a moment of gratuitous badness that a simple copy-edit should at any rate have caught, which really does create the impression that nobody of importance on the production cared at all. I'm not one of these people who believe the filmmakers should be "respecting the fans" at every turn -- but not respecting your own craft and product is a different kettle of fish... and one of the reasons I hold it against Abrams is that I know for a fact he is, or can be, a better filmmaker than that.)

Click to expand...

Even setting aside that things like warp drive and the transporter are laughably unscientific, you're making a huge leap here.

Going from;

The writers obviously not caring about the specific made-up futuristic technobabble reasons for a Starship being underwater or how to stop a giant volcano.

To;

The writers obviously don't care about anything.

The truth is that you seem to care about these kinds of things in the fiction you enjoy, and the people who made these films seem to not. The only thing that proves is that these movies are not to your taste.

At a certain point one must agree to disagree, and that's fine. However:

We have almost no information on why the Enterprise is hiding down there and we don't need it. Mostly because a good portion of the audience doesn't care. I get that you do, and that's cool, but pretending that it's some objective yardstick by which to measure the quality of the writing in the scene is intellectually dishonest.

Click to expand...

A situation doesn't have to be explained to have some kind of workable explicability. And if you don't have the latter, yes, what you generally have is bad writing. What's "intellectually dishonest" is trying to pretend it is "intellectually dishonest" to point that out.

Now, whether or not the audience cares about whether the writing is good is a different question. You point out very correctly that much of the audience and the filmmakers obviously just don't care, and I completely agree with that. If all one is aiming at is forgettable popcorn cinema, then cool. But the thing about shoddily-crafted blockbusters is that they're disposable and usually quickly forgotten, so the question is whether that model is really the "Future of Trek."*

If you think it is, that's fine. But I'd appreciate your not trying to tell me I'm "dishonest" for thinking otherwise.

(* And in fairness, it may well be. The first purpose of cinema after all is making money: if that can be done by wrapping flashy action in the Trek brand, which it demonstrably can, then it's hard to see how Paramount has the incentive for anything else. But I like to see people do well, and I'd like to see the great cast of the Abrams movies -- all of whom clearly love their characters and are selling the hell out of the material they have to work with -- in something... more. And I do hope, perhaps irrationally, that it may yet happen.)

See, BigJake, it's not a problem, that in your opinion it is bad writing and Junk Cinema, that's a valid viewpoint for you. Where the problem lies is the way you put forward that viewpoint, as if it's incontrovertible fact that it is indeed bad writing and junk cinema and that anyone who doesn't agree with your incontrovertible fact is wrong, especially when that viewpoint is the minority opinion. It comes off as elitism, and an attitude that 9 out of 10 people who saw the movie don't know what good writing is because they voted thumbs up for it. I believe it was you, yourself, who pointed out there is no "accepted guidelines for what is good or bad writing" and that writers have been debating it for decades (probably for Centuries, actually). It's not like Math, where there is incontrovertible facts about what is and isn't bad Math

My comments come down to "if it had been better written it would have been a better movie."

Click to expand...

Better written by whose standards?

The only thing you've offered up is some vague "they" who have had "conversations" about what constitutes good writing.

You could destroy most movies ever made if you went over them with as fine a comb as some folks are going over Star Trek Into Darkness with.

Did I like Star Trek Into Darkness the first time I saw it? Yes. Do I think the story holds up on subsequent viewings? Yes (I've seen it seven times total). Do I think it has some flaws? Yes. I thought the transition from Harrison to Khan was awkward. I, personally, have some confusion about the torpedoes. But those two flaws don't come close to sinking the movie for me.

I'm currently reading the first book from the Star Trek: The Fall mini-series. It really isn't doing anything for me and I've posted exactly twice (in two different threads) about it without trying to insult the person who wrote it:

For those who bought Star Trek: The Fall: Crimson Shadow because the paperback was on sale at Amazon, you spent too much. The eBook is now cheaper at $4.55.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the heads up.

I was going to skip the rest of 'The Fall' based on how underwhelming the first book has been so far and having other things to read. But I figure $4.55 is too good to pass up especially since I enjoyed McCormack's last Trek novel.

I usually love George's work but I'm about seventy pages in and am really struggling to even care what's going on and the pace of the book is brutally slow.

Click to expand...

If something is as offensive to your sensibilities as Star Trek Into Darkness seems to be, I would think that you'd find something to do with your time that would be more to your liking. The movie is in the can, there's no changing it now.

Now, whether or not the audience cares about whether the writing is good is a different question. You point out very correctly that much of the audience and the filmmakers obviously just don't care, and I completely agree with that. If all one is aiming at is forgettable popcorn cinema, then cool. But the thing about shoddily-crafted blockbusters is that they're disposable and usually quickly forgotten, so the question is whether that model is really the "Future of Trek."

Click to expand...

You see what you've done here?

I was very careful to craft my words so as to try and illustrate the point, and then you misrepresent what I just said.

As a few people have already demonstrated with the most casual of effort, the situation easily has workable explicability.

Click to expand...

If that's something you actually believe has happened, I think it really is best that we just leave it there.

I was very careful to craft my words so as to try and illustrate the point, and then you misrepresent what I just said.

Click to expand...

You very carefully tried to conflate "caring about good writing" with "caring about made-up technobabble nonsense" and to pretend caring about the former was demanding that people care about the latter. If that works for you, fine, but I'm not playing along.

You very carefully tried to conflate "caring about good writing" with "caring about made-up technobabble nonsense" and to pretend caring about the former was demanding that people care about the latter. If that works for you, fine, but I'm not playing along.

Click to expand...

That is literally the opposite of what I did. I'm trying to demonstrate that the problem you're having with the writing of that particular scene is a matter of taste, and is not an objective metric of good or bad writing.

A situation doesn't have to be explained to have some kind of workable explicability. And if you don't have the latter, yes, what you generally have is bad writing.

Click to expand...

But you do get an explanation: Kirk is immature. It's right there in the film when Pike relieves him of command.

"Natives who have barely invented the wheel see a starship rising up out of their ocean!"

Do we need Kirk to explicitly explain why he hid the Enterprise down there? We know it's a bad idea from a technology standpoint as Scott is complaining about it, we know the entire situation is dangerous from the bridge dialogue and we know that it shouldn't have happened from Pike's dialogue.